Jury finds Fairfield woman guilty of murdering her elderly mother

— A jury today convicted a 45-year-old Fairfield woman of strangling her mother with a necktie, apparently to gain access to her credit cards so she could pay off the family's debts she'd created through a gambling problem.

The jury convicted Tina Lunney of murder and weapons charges in the July 22, 2009 killing of Marie Zoppi, 81. Lunney remained stone-faced as the foreman read the verdict. The jury of six men and six women deliberated for a day and a half.

Lunney faces thirty years to life in prison when she is sentenced July 26.

"It's justice for Marie Zoppi, an 81-year-old who was strangled by her daughter," Assistant Prosecutor Dawn Simonetti said following the verdict. "It was murder and the jurors got it right today."

Zoppi was found with a necktie around her neck, in the first-floor apartment of the home she shared with Lunney and Lunney's husband and two children. Lunney confessed to the killing and to staging the scene to look like a suicide in an eerily casual and matter-of-fact 45 minute interview with police.

Her attorney, Albert Kapin argued throughout the trial the confession was false, brought on by the stresses of bankrupting her family, the guilt of having an affair with a local police officer and the shock of finding her mother dead.

A psychologist who saw Lunney in jail and later diagnosed her with bipolar disorder disorder testified that a person in her mental state could have been susceptible to suggestion.

But Simonetti and Assistant Prosecutor Alex Albu presented more than a dozen witnesses corroborating the confession Lunney gave to police in which she said she killed her mother, locked her in the first floor apartment then called in late to work. She told her kids and husband that the woman was out with her brother and carried on for 24 hours as though nothing had happened.

Then the morning of July 23, 2009 Lunney called her husband hysterical and told him her mother had committed suicide. She presented him with a note which read "Tell the kids I love them. You don't need me."

Investigators were quick to rule the death a homicide and a medical examiner listed Zoppi's death as strangulation with multiple broken ribs and a contusion to the forehead.

The day after reporting her mother's death, Lunney disappeared for three days in which she went to the Bloomfield library where she wrote suicide notes to her family on the back of fliers and then to Atlantic City's Trump Marina casino.

Lunney returned home and was picked up by police who brought her to the prosecutor's office where she immediately confessed to the murder.

The trial has been attended by Zoppi's daughter-in-law who with tears in her eyes declined to comment following the verdict. Simonetti called Lunney's ex-husband, Chris who testified during the trial, immediately after the verdict was read.